The Fight for Life
A desperate effort to assist the survivors
BANDA ACEH, INDONESIA--The missing boy's aunt has a friend who swears she saw the nephew in some TV footage of a bunch of survivors at a refugee camp. "The boy is saved," she moans, "but they don't know where." No one has been able to find him. Another nephew squats in a filthy courtyard, a gash on his nose, a fat bandage over one eye. When the earth quaked and the sea surged, he was swept away by it, his frail body dashed against what he thinks was a fence. His brother, too, got caught up in the roiling waters. Today, the brother remains among the missing. What's striking about the boy with the gashed nose is not his injuries but the vacant look in his one good eye--a look more often associated with combat veterans and all the more unsettling for the boy's tender age.
It is a look that may be seen on the faces of nearly everyone in this wasteland that used to be a sleepy provincial capital, and in the crumpled coastal villages that stretch to the empty horizon in both directions. Idly, like skeletal, mud-covered zombies, men and women paw through mountains of rubble, sorting wood from aluminum, junk and jetsam from a household item miraculously unscathed by the roaring tide of waterborne debris. Beneath the fetid water and the shapeless rubble used to be their homes, but when they try to talk about what happened, those who survived the tsunami here speak without emotion, without hope. Two weeks after the massive floods that took so many lives in so many different countries, many of those left to cope with the apocalyptic aftermath are finding it impossible to imagine the future, immobilized by the prospect of putting their shattered lives back together. Well-meaning relief workers tell of rebuilding efforts but say they will take as long as three years. The survivors stare blankly, utterly unable to conceive of tomorrow, much less three years from now.
Compassion. To call this one of the world's worst natural disasters hardly begins to suggest the epic scope of the death and devastation. The body count is still going on in Indonesia, the hardest hit of the 11 nations afflicted by the tsunami, but the total will probably exceed 150,000, and the precise number, given the absence of accurate census counts in much of the region and the remoteness of many of the affected areas, will never be known.
As striking as the destruction, however, has been the world's response to the suffering and the extraordinary rush to help the survivors. As billions of dollars in aid are pledged, crates and pallets of food, medicine, and clothing choke airports across the region--so much of it that some relief organizations have actually started turning down gifts until they can figure out how to get what they have to the thousands and thousands of those left orphaned, injured, and homeless in the floods' wake.
All that generosity, however, is but an abstraction to the people here in Banda Aceh, where the market they once bought their vegetables and fish in is still littered with swollen bodies. It's hard to look forward when you can still look over the side of the twisted concrete and steel bridge, gaze into the Pehayng River, and watch the corpse of a woman go by, a plastic bottle tangled in her legs, face down in a chillingly perfect "dead man's float." Or see the body of a child or small woman being pulled from a canal by three Indonesian soldiers. Farther down the street, only a foot protrudes from the earth, thus far escaping official notice and, so, still not added to the body count.
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